What is “EV”?
EV stands for eingetragener Verein (German), a nonprofit organization used primarily in Austria, Germany, Hungary. The suffix signals that the business has limited liability and is privately held.
Full meaning & translation
The full form is eingetragener Verein, a German-language term. It translates literally as “registered association.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as egyéni vállalkozó, eingetragener verein.
Where it's used
EV appears in company names registered in the following 3 jurisdictions:
What it tells you about the company
Equivalent forms around the world
These are the closest structural equivalents to EV in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.
Normalizing “EV” in your data
When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme EV” and “Acme” should resolve to the same entity. One API call strips it and returns a stable canonical form:
curl -X POST https://api.ambect.com/v1/normalize/company \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $AMBECT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"name": "Acme EV", "country": "at"}'{
"data": {
"canonical": "acme ev",
"legal_type": null,
"tokens": [
"acme",
"ev"
]
},
"meta": {
"pipeline": [
"lowercase",
"legal_suffix"
],
"confidence": 0.99
}
}Frequently asked questions
What does EV stand for?
EV stands for eingetragener Verein (German), which translates as "registered association".
Is a EV public or private?
A EV is a private entity — its shares are not publicly listed or traded on a stock exchange.
What is the liability in a EV?
Owners of a EV have limited liability. Their personal assets are protected, and their exposure is capped at the amount they invested.
Which countries use EV?
EV is used in Austria, Germany, Hungary.
Need to normalize EV at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.
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